Diane Duane - The Wizard's Dilemma

Kit was looking at the second full page of Nita's work. Now he turned it over and looked at the third page, the last one. "This," he said, tapping a section near the end, "is pretty slick." "Thanks."

"But the rest of this—" Kit shook his head, turned back to the first two pages, and touched four or five other sections, one after another, so that they grayed out. "I don't see why we need these. This whole centra-replication routine would be great—if the chemicals in the pollution knew how to reproduce themselves. But since they don't, it's a lot of power for hardly any return. And implementing these is going to be a real pain. If you just take this one—" he touched another section and it brightened—"and this, and this, and you—"

Nita frowned. "But look, Kit, if you leave those out, then there's nothing that's going to deal with the sewer outfall between Zachs Bay and Tobay Beach. That's tons of toxic sludge every month. Without those routines—"

Kit closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose in a way Nita had seen Tom, their local advisory wizard, do more than once when the world started to get to him. "Neets, this is all just too involved. Or involved in the wrong way. You're making it more complicated than it needs to be."

Oh no... here we go again. I thought he was going to get it this time, I really did... "But if you don't name all the chemicals, if you don't describe them accurately—"

"The thing is, you don't have to name them all. If you just take a look at the spell I brought with—" Friday Afternoon

"Kit, look. That stripped-down version you're suggesting isn't going to do the job. And the longer we don't do something, the worse the problem gets! Everything that lives along this shoreline is being affected... whatever's still alive, anyway. Things are dying out there, and every time we go back to the drawing board on this, more things die. Getting this wizardry running has taken too long already."

"Tell me about it," Kit said in a tone that struck Nita as a lot more ironic than it needed to be.

And after all the work I did! she thought. Nonetheless she tried to calm down. "All right. What do you think we should do?"

"Maybe," Kit said, and paused, "maybe it would be good if we let S'reee take a look at both versions. If she thinks—"

Nita's eyes widened. "Since when do we need a third opinion on something this straightforward? Kit, it'll either do what it's supposed to or it won't. Let's test it and find out!"

He took a deep breath and shook his head. "I can tell already, it's not going to do what we need."

She stared at Kit, not knowing what to say, and then after a moment she got up and stared down at him, trying to keep from clenching her fists. "Well, if you're so sure you're right, why don't you just do it yourself? Since my advice plainly isn't worth jack to you."

"It's not that it's not worth anything, it's that—" "Oh, now you apologize."

"I wasn't apologizing." "Well, maybe you need to!"

"Neets," Kit said, also frowning now, "what do you want me to do? Tell you that I think it's gonna be fine, when I don't really think so?"

Nita flushed. When you were working with the Speech, in which what you described would come to pass, lying could be fatal... and you quickly learned that even talking about spells less than honestly was dangerous.

"Energy is precious," Kit said. "Neither of us can just throw it around the way we used to a couple years ago. It's a nuisance, but it's something we have to consider."

"Do you think I wasn't considering it? I took my time over that. I didn't even put it through the spell checker. I checked all the syntax, all the balances, by hand. It took me forever, but—"

"Maybe the 'forever' was a hint, Neets," Kit said.

She had been trying to hang on to her temper, but now Nita got so furious that her eyes felt hot. "Fine," she said tightly. "Then you go right ahead and handle this yourself. And just leave me out of it until you find something you feel is simplistic enough to involve me in."

Kit's expression was shocked, and Nita didn't care. Who needs this? she thought. No matter what I try to do, it's not good enough! So maybe it's time I stopped trying. Let him work it out himself, if he can.

Nita turned and made her way back down the jetty, her eyes narrowed in annoyance as she slapped her claudication open and pulled out the rowan wand. In one angry, economical gesture, she whipped the wand

around her, dropping her most frequently used transit circle to the stones, the one that would take her home. It was a little harder to speak the spell than usual. Her throat was tight, but not so much so that she couldn't say the words that would get her out of there. In a clap of imploding air, she was gone, and spray from a wave that crashed against the jetty went through the place where she had been.

Friday, Early Evening

KIT RODRIGUEZ JUST SAT there on the concrete platform at the bottom of the Jones Inlet light tower for some minutes, looking at the spot where Nita had vanished, listening to the hiss of the surf, and trying to work out what the heck had just happened.

What did I say? Kit went over their conversation a couple of times in his head and couldn't find any reason for her to have gotten so upset. What is her problem these days? It can't be school. Nobody bothers her anymore; she does okay.

It was a puzzle, and one he'd been having no luck solving. Maybe it was because he'd been so busy... and not just during the last couple of months, either. Granted, lately he'd been spending a lot of time on the bottom of the Great South Bay. And over the past couple of years, he'd also been to Europe, and had stopped off on or near most of the planets in the solar system, though only on the way to places much farther out, including some places that weren't exactly planets. Even Kit's mother, who initially had been really nervous about his wizardry, had eventually started to admit that all that travel was probably going to be educational, and theoretically ought to make him, if not smarter, at least more mature. But Kit was beginning to have his doubts. For the past few weeks, when he hadn't been in school, in bed, or a few hundred feet deep in water, he'd been spending a lot of his spare time sitting on a particular rock in the Lunar Carpathians, looking down on the green-blue gem that was Earth from three hundred thousand kilometers out, and coming back again and again to the question, Are girls another species?

The first time the thought had occurred to him, he'd felt embarrassed. He had been in places where members of other species had been present in their hundreds—sometimes in their thousands—tentacles and oozy bits and all. None of them had at the time struck him as all that alien; they were, when you got right down to it, just people. And though their differences from human beings were tremendous, sometimes making them completely incomprehensible, that still didn't undermine his affection for them. He liked the aliens he met, even when they were weird. Come to think of it, I like them because they're weird. But Nita, who theoretically was just as human as Kit was, had been pushing the weirdness-andincomprehensibility envelope pretty hard lately. Her behavior was hard to understand, from someone who was usually so rational—

Something dark broke the dazzle of the water about a quarter mile away. Kit cocked an ear and heard a long high whistle, slightly muffled, and after that first shape—a short stumpy barnacle-pocked dorsal fin — came the sleek dark shining shape of the back of a humpback whale, rolling in the water as she breached and blew. One small eye set way down at the end of the long, long jaw regarded Kit as S'reee slid toward the jetty, back-finning expertly to keep from coming to grief on the rocks. "Dai stiho, Kit," she whistled and clicked in the Speech. "Sorry I'm late. Traffic..."